Conventionally, a cell culturing work has manually been done by a skilled worker in a clean room, which is disinfected as much as possible, under a strict manufacturing process. Therefore, when a lot of cells are cultured for industrialization, a burden on a worker might increase, time and cost required for education and development of the worker might increase, a human error might occur, a specimen might wrongly be taken, or a biological contamination by human having bacteria might occur. Much cost has to be taken for solving these problems. This becomes a big hurdle for the industrialization of culturing a lot of cells.
Therefore, it has been expected that these problems are solved by automating a series of the culturing work by a device. In view of this, an automated cell culture device that imitates a manual culturing work has been mainly developed in recent days by using an articulated robot manipulator. However, since the manual culturing work is made by complicated actions, the automated culture device needs to aseptically handle a culture vessel and culture solution in a level equal to the manual handling, or in a simplified level.
In order to realize this, Patent Literature 1 provides an example of carrying a culture vessel or performing a medium replacement by using an articulated robot manipulator, for example. The robot manipulator described in Patent Literature 1 has a self-sterilizing structure.
Patent Literature 2 proposes a method in which a culture vessel and a flow channel are in a closed system, for example. This method is for a device that has a culture vessel and a flow channel provided in a closed system for culturing chondrocyte cell under a high pressure, and this method is for extracting the culture cell and the flow channel, a part of which is plugged, without being exposed to the open air after the culture process is finished. This method includes a unit for collecting the chondrocyte cell that is aseptically generated.